The Dilemma of Privatized Public Services: Philosophical Frames in Understanding Failure and Managing Partnership Terminations

This paper uses social theory to explicate the competing perspectives on the on-going and, increasing, privatization of public services in the U.K. It suggests that if business ignores these perspectives then political imperatives will come into play that will inevitably turn privatization initiatives commercially sour.Contrary to political rhetoric, public/private partnerships (PPPs) constitute a more strategic form and process of out-sourcing, demanding that wherever public funding flows, private rent-seeking opportunities be created for the private sector. Seen in these terms, managerial elites will need to understand and anticipate conditions under which the state would seek to terminate lucrative partnering arrangements in the public interest.Political–administrative dialogue on partnerships can involve an unresponsive discourse or a dialogue of the deaf, both constituting a threat to business through the imposition of undefined community service obligations or hostile and unprofitable terminations by the state. Performance required of PPPs goes beyond market success and requires co-optation of strategic stakeholders, raising significant issues about corporate governance directions. Business leaders will need to develop communicative rationalities that build pluralized decision structures and implementation capacities. The paper concludes by outlining design features of more effective regulatory regimes to avoid hostile and unprofitable terminations of increasingly contested PPPs. The conclusion is less sanguine about the ability, or even the wish, of governments to do so.     

Consumer Effort in Promotional Incentives

Consumers need to exert effort to use the incentives provided in a promotion campaign. This effort is critical in the consumers’ decision process and for the success of the campaign. We develop a model of consumer redemption effort that is general in nature and is applicable to coupons, rebates, and other price‐discrimination devices. We find that the impact of redemption effort is quite intricate on a firm’s profit and consumers’ surplus. We find that there are cases where a firm would like to operate in a low redemption cost environment while consumers would be better off with higher costs. We identify cases where price can remain the same with or without the promotion. In these cases, it is possible that the surplus for each individual consumer is higher when a firm price discriminates and improves its profit. Our results indicate that a firm would rather have variation in consumer redemption costs than to have variation in consumer valuations. However, in a market with low valuation variability, consumer redemption cost variability is essential for an efficient promotion campaign. Therefore, the markets that naturally have a lot of variability in consumer valuations should be the ones targeted for online promotion programs that reduce consumer effort levels, not the markets with low variability.     

Disentangling the Roles of Modernization and Secularization on Fertility: The Case of Turkey

Population Research and Policy Review - Second demographic transition (SDT) theory argues very low fertility results from the simultaneous processes of modernization and secularization. However,...     

Un nouveau type d'indice de la criminalité pour le Canada*

The authors present the results of a research project in which the aim was to develop for Canada an index of criminology and delinquency based on public appraisal of the seriousness of various criminal offences. This new kind of index of crime was originally proposed in the United States by T. Sellin and M. E. Wolfgang. The possibility of using such an index in order to compensate for the shortcomings of present statistics on criminal behaviour is brought out as a research conclusion. The index has advantages as well for the development of international statistics on crime.     

Organizational Factors Affecting Individuals to Donate to NPOs in the Turkish Context

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - While more and more people have been forced from their homes by natural disasters, wars, and violence, the citizens of the...     

Children with severe learning disabilities: needs,services and costs

This study looks at how services are used by children with severe learning disabilities living at home and explores the associated total and component costs. Multivariate and bivariate analyses are employed and the results interpreted alongside information on parents' perceptions of their children's needs for healthcare. There is some evidence to suggest costs were associated with greater needs but there is also evidence of under‐provision of formal care supports, particularly mental health services. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Assessing Euro 2020 Strategy Using Multi-criteria Decision Making Methods: VIKOR and TOPSIS

Social Indicators Research - The European Union (EU) 2020 Strategy aims at forming the conditions for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth targets. Assessment of the EU countries’...     

Testing hypotheses on coefficients of variation from a series of two-armed experiments

We consider the problem of testing hypotheses on the difference of the coefficients of variation from several two-armed experiments with normally distributed outcomes. In particular, we deal with testing the homogeneity of the difference of the coefficients of variation and testing the equality of the difference of the coefficients of variation to a specified value. The test statistics proposed are derived in a limiting one-way classification with fixed effects and heteroscedastic error variances, using results from analysis of variance. By way of simulation, the performance of these test statistics is compared for both testing problems considered.     

Small sample properties of tests on homogeneity in one—way Anova and Meta—analysis

Received: January 12, 2000; revised version: July 26, 2000     

Extensions of stability selection using subsamples of observations and covariates

We introduce extensions of stability selection, a method to stabilise variable selection methods introduced by Meinshausen and Bühlmann (J R Stat Soc 72:417–473, 2010). We propose to apply a base selection method repeatedly to random subsamples of observations and subsets of covariates under scrutiny, and to select covariates based on their selection frequency. We analyse the effects and benefits of these extensions. Our analysis generalizes the theoretical results of Meinshausen and Bühlmann (J R Stat Soc 72:417–473, 2010) from the case of half-samples to subsamples of arbitrary size. We study, in a theoretical manner, the effect of taking random covariate subsets using a simplified score model. Finally we validate these extensions on numerical experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, and compare the obtained results in detail to the original stability selection method.